by Brad Matsen
Two months later off Corsica, equipped with the old, heavy, lead batteries that did not catch on fire, La Souscoupe took Cousteau and Falco to 1,000 feet and returned without incident to the surface. During the next year, with Falco or Laban at the controls, the diving saucer made fifteen dives in the Mediterranean Sea, carrying geologists and biologists to places none of their kind had ever been before. With La Souscoupe’s hydraulic claw, they collected samples of mud, rocks, sediment, and dozens of sea creatures, many of them new to science. Falco and Laban kept logs on tape and filmed their descents with movie cameras, while Aqua-Lung divers captured the nimble little yellow submarine descending into the darkness of the abyss.
After their successes on the mid-Atlantic rift, in New York, and with La Souscoupe, Cousteau and his divers were more capable of visiting the world beneath the surface of the sea than any other human beings in history. Now, Cousteau declared when Calypso returned to Marseille at the end of 1960, they would find a way to live there for extended periods of time. It was not a new idea. In the seventeenth century, the freethinking bishop John Wilkins advocated the development of underwater houses to colonize the oceans. Two hundred years later, American Simon Lake built wheeled submarines with hatches through which his submariners could leave and return while submerged. Recently, Commander George Bond had been trying to persuade the U.S. Navy to explore the possibility that scuba divers could work for days and even weeks underwater by living in gas-filled shelters on the bottom instead of surfacing. Bond called it “saturation diving,” which meant that a diver’s blood and tissues became saturated with nitrogen, which caused no ill effects as long as the diver didn’t return to the surface, where decompression sickness could injure or kill him. Saturated divers could do all kinds of work that hard-hat divers and ordinary scuba divers could not do, such as installing offshore oil rigs and pipelines in deep water and setting up antisubmarine sonar networks. The U.S. Navy wasn’t interested. Bond, who had been awed by The Silent World, called Cousteau and asked him to help test his radical concept for working underwater.
“I have long felt that undersea exploration is not an end in itself, although it is spiritually rewarding merely to be an onlooker,” Cousteau said. “The privilege of our era, to enter this great unknown medium, must produce greater knowledge of the oceans and lead to assessment and exploitation of their natural resources. In the end man must and shall colonize the deeper ocean floor.”
The first phase, Continental Shelf I—known as Conshelf I—was simple. Two divers would live for one week in a watertight steel cylinder 18 feet long and 8 feet in diameter, anchored with chains 7 feet above the bottom at a depth of 37 feet. The divers would work several hours each day to depths of 80 feet, but never shallower than the depth of the cylinder. They would enter and leave their home through an open hole in the bottom of the cylinder called a moon-pool, the water kept out by the air pressure inside.
Since successfully testing La Souscoupe, Falco had been Cousteau’s de facto second in command aboard Calypso. He led the Conshelf expedition, christening the cylinder Diogenes after the beggar-philosopher who lived in a bathtub on an Athens street. Cousteau selected another Calypso diver, Claude Wesly, to join Falco in becoming the world’s first aquanauts. Wesly, who was thirty years old, had been with Calypso since the first expedition to the Red Sea. He had a parrot that was older than he was, a raucous, foul-mouthed bird that usually lived ashore with Wesly’s wife and daughter but had made short trips aboard Calypso. Wesly pleaded to take his parrot with him. The bird could easily make the quick descent to Diogenes in a pressure cooker and would, like a mineshaft canary, die first to warn the men if the air became toxic. Cousteau and Falco said no.
On the morning of September 14, 1962, Calypso towed Diogenes from Marseille to a bay on Frioul, an abandoned island that had last been home to a yellow fever quarantine hospital. Espadon, a power barge packed with equipment, friends, families, reporters, and photographers, followed Calypso. In a little more than an hour, scuba divers had set the anchors to hold Diogenes in place, turned on the remote television cameras inside and outside of the cylinder, and checked the connections of tubes from the surface carrying air, water, and electricity. A few minutes after noon, Falco, a bachelor, said goodbye to his mother, and Wesly kissed his wife and daughter and stroked the parrot, which they had brought with them for the day, and they were gone.
Falco and Wesly had worked on the Conshelf cylinder from design to outfitting. There were no surprises when they surfaced in the open moonpool in its floor and looked around at the little room that would be their home for a week. Somehow the fact that it was underwater made it thrilling. Though facilities were Spartan, everything they needed was there. Berths stood 2 feet apart on one end, with shelves over them holding a radio, books, a television set that could receive the French national broadcasting station, and a picture of Calypso’s bottom from below painted by André Laban, who, for ten years, had been perfecting techniques for actually painting underwater. Across the moonpool on the other end of the cylinder were a table and chairs, a counter for serving the food that would be prepared on Calypso and sent down in pressure cookers, and a hot plate to reheat it if they didn’t eat it immediately. Four electric fans, two on each end, circulated the air pumped from the surface. In the center, over to the moonpool, were racks for their Aqua-Lungs, emergency air tanks, fins, masks, cameras, and other equipment. Next to the equipment racks was a shower with an unlimited supply of hot water piped from above. The ocean outside would be their toilet, eliminating the need for that kind of plumbing.
Five hours after they arrived in their underwater home, Falco and Wesly were saturated with nitrogen and would have to undergo reoxygenation of their bodies to return to the surface. If the cylinder ruptured or a fire broke out, or in some other life-threatening emergency, they would bail out with their Aqua-Lungs and wait for help from above. Raymond Kientzy, who was the alternate oceanaut for the Conshelf I mission, was in command of fifteen scuba divers who were standing by in shifts in full equipment twenty-four hours a day on Calypso. Two doctors swam down twice a day to conduct two-and-a-half-hour examinations of the aquanauts, including electrocardiograms and blood tests.
For the first two days, Falco and Wesly were like boys in the most exotic playground they could imagine. They greeted visiting divers in Diogenes with harmonica duets, performed little skits for the television cameras that were always on, and frolicked outside for the ten-man film crews that spent more than an hour each day below. Falco and Wesly wore light blue gloves to distinguish them from the other divers, and seemed to swim with a touch of arrogance, knowing that everyone but they were limited to a couple of hours, at most, on the bottom.
When the doctors popped through the moonpool on the third morning, there was no harmonica duet to greet them. The aquanauts were subdued, no longer mugging for the cameras or asking for details about life on the surface. For the first time, neither of them asked about their families. Falco said he hadn’t dreamed in years but was having nightmares about a disembodied hand strangling him. He was also plagued by constant visions of the air pumps failing and the lower pressure in the cylinder allowing it to completely flood through the moonpool. Wesly was sleeping okay but having trouble dealing with the moods of the once indefatigable Falco.
On the fourth day, Cousteau sent down a psychologist to evaluate the crew of Diogenes. He administered a battery of psych-technical and motor-function tests, on which Falco and Wesly were within normal limits. Except for Falco’s anxiety and Wesly’s growing irritation, they were doing fine, considering that they were cooped up in a small space and forbidden from returning to the surface. What would help, the psychologist asked? Fewer doctors, Falco told him. Cousteau reduced the daily physicals to one. What else, he asked? Send us a phonograph and some classical records, Wesly replied.
The exhaustion of coping with their living environment and a steady schedule of chores outside Diogenes was the real problem, the doctor told
Cousteau that night. That and the fact that they were living in a small, single room. The next undersea habitat would have to contain more than one room. Further invading their privacy was the constant intrusion of phone calls from the surface day and night. Cousteau ordered a ban on all but essential phone calls. From then on, Falco and Wesly were left alone except for food shipments, doctor’s visits, and the camera crews filming them when they were working outside Diogenes. The television monitors inside showed them usually doing nothing, listening to music, lying in their beds bundled up in wool pullovers, fleece-lined boots, and the red knit watch caps that had been favored by hard-hat divers for decades.
Under the new regime of increased isolation from the surface, Falco and Wesly improved and got some work done. They built a net corral for fish, sampled a bed of shrimp, and explored an ancient shipwreck that no one knew was there until they found it on one of their meanderings around the bottom. On the sixth day, their last, Falco and Wesly entertained Cousteau for lunch. He brought down a tin of caviar and a bottle of wine, which he had trouble opening because of the air pressure in the cylinder. Falco noticed Cousteau having trouble with the cork and asked his commandant to whistle a tune. Cousteau pursed his lips and blew, but no sound came out. Falco and Wesly collapsed in laughter, then whistled together. Everything is different here, even learning to whistle, Wesly said.
On their last night, after the celebratory lunch with Cousteau, Falco predicted in his diary the future of living underwater. “The Pasha is thinking of deeper stations,” Falco wrote, “several buildings constructed in stages—a Himalaya in reverse with Base Camp One, Camp Two, and so forth on down where we would stay weeks, even months to work. The Pasha is eloquent, full of ideas—the wine or the pressure? He talks about colonizing the continental shelf. We would all live underwater with wives and children. We would have schools and cafes. A real Wild West! I can see Claude as Sheriff of the Deep.”
On the morning of the seventh day, Falco and Wesly lay on their cots wearing face masks to breathe a mixture of 80 percent oxygen and 20 percent nitrogen, approximately the reverse of ordinary air. The usual way to return to the surface would have been to recompress in a chamber for many hours until their blood gases had returned to normal, but Cousteau and his dive table expert Jean Ali-nat were certain that the high-oxygen mixture would do the job with far less risk and discomfort. It worked. Falco and Wesly surfaced just after one in the afternoon, with no ill effects.
“The sun is good,” Falco said as he stood on shaking legs aboard Calypso. “The land is beautiful.”
“What would you like?” Cousteau asked him.
“To walk,” Falco replied.
14
WORLD WITHOUT SUN
A MONTH AFTER Calypso towed Diogenes back to Marseille, Cousteau delivered a speech at the World Congress on Underwater Activities in London. The implications of the Conshelf I success for underwater oil and mineral development were enormous, Cousteau said. The divers so necessary for anchoring and maintaining pumps, pipelines, and drilling rigs on the bottom were no longer constrained by their own human physiology. They could work underwater for days, even weeks, as long as they did not come to the surface. Cousteau pointed out that they could remain at depth in a compression chamber as well as in a habitat on the ocean floor. Conshelf I had proved the concept. Cousteau moved on to his main point, a recitation of what he had told Falco and Wesly over caviar and wine on their last day aboard Diogenes.
“A new species of human being is evolving,” he said. “Homo aquaticus.”
Murmurs and shuffling among the audience of oceanographers, geologists, biologists, and divers broke the silence in the lecture hall. Cousteau pressed on.
“After living in compressed air habitats for a generation, Water People will be born at the bottom of the sea. They will breathe by extracting oxygen directly from water after operations to surgically implant gills in their throats, bringing humanity full circle back into the sea,” Cousteau told his startled audience of ocean scientists. “Diving has gone beyond sport. It is now a worldwide movement. The imperative need now is to place swimmers underwater for very long periods, to really learn about the sea. I think there will be a conscious evolution of Homo aquaticus, spurred by human intelligence rather than the slow blind natural adaptation of species. We are now moving toward an alteration of human anatomy to give man almost unlimited freedom underwater.”
Cousteau, with microphone, greets André Laban emerging from the Conshelf III sphere in 1965 (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
For fifteen uncomfortable minutes, the delegates listened as a man whose credentials as an undersea explorer were unassailable demolished his reputation for responsible scientific inquiry. Water people would be born at the bottom of the sea by the year 2000, he predicted. They would have lungs filled with an incompressible liquid, and breathe by a blood-regenerating technique, and swim to depths of a mile. Beyond that, he said, the pressure of 170 atmospheres would crush a human body.
Several delegates told the press that Homo aquaticus was pure science fiction and wondered if Cousteau had lost his marbles. Cousteau responded by questioning what was wrong with science fiction as a predictor of future reality. Look at Jules Verne, he insisted. His visions of submarines and men swimming free underwater had come true.
“The informed human imagination has projected what was to come for hundreds of years. Actually, I was trying to be conservative in talking about the underwater future in London,” Cousteau said. “Why, there are people at the congress who wanted to talk about milking whales in regular underwater dairies. We know practically nothing about the depths of the ocean.”
Regardless of his flight of fancy in London, Cousteau found plenty of interest in continuing his undersea habitat experiments among oil exploration companies. He was also sure the adventures would make another great movie. Cousteau announced that he would accomplish three goals. First, a team of divers would spend an entire month living in a base station 33 feet, or 2 atmospheres, down and working at depths to 60 feet. Second, another team would spend a week living at 82 feet, or 3.5 atmospheres, and working at depths down to 160 feet. Finally, the divers at the upper station would assemble and install an undersea garage for La Souscoupe to maintain and use the diving saucer without ever returning to the surface.
Calypso’s schedule for the remainder of 1962 included missions to test Papa Flash’s invention of a seismic transceiver that could pick out hard objects buried several feet in sediment and to sample the chemistry of seawater around the Mediterranean. Cousteau remained ashore to seal a deal with the French petroleum consortium to partially finance the next step in realizing his prediction that humans would eventually return to the sea. The oilmen were in for about half the $1.2 million Cousteau needed for Conshelf II.
The proposal Cousteau and James Dugan made to Columbia Pictures at the end of 1962 was an irresistible blend of Calypso divers, the exotic reefs of the Red Sea, and the tension created by putting seven men on the bottom of the ocean to see if they would survive. After the success of the far less ambitious Silent World, the movie studio pushed the other half of the Conshelf II budget into the pot. By the new year, Cousteau had all the money he needed.
In February 1963, Cousteau again took Calypso through the Suez Canal on a reconnaissance voyage to find the right location for his undersea village. After three hard weeks of diving every day in a new location, he found the perfect spot 27 miles north of Port Sudan, about halfway down on the western side of the Red Sea. The city had an international airport for resupplying the expeditions and a deep-water port, and, best of all, it lay at the heart of one of the greatest coral reefs on earth. Cousteau had a host of technical challenges to overcome in his quest to live underwater, but he was very aware that the world beneath the sea had to look good to theater audiences. The necklace of coral off Sudan was also perfect for him, because it dropped into the abyss in steplike tiers. Cousteau could anchor both his shallow-and deep-water stations to a flat bottom
, which would make everything, especially handling La Souscoupe, much easier than on a gradually sloping reef.
“If we could make a station on the Sudanese reef,” Cousteau declared at a press conference he called to launch Conshelf II, “floor settlements would be possible in other remote and inhospitable climes where the sea had hoarded her bounties.”
Three months later, in June, Cousteau was back at Port Sudan with Calypso and the chartered Italian cargo ship Rosaldo. The freighter carried 500 tons of prefabricated steel for the main station, the diving saucer garage, and the deep station; lead ballast, cables, hoses, food, wine, water, and air compressors; and tanks of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium. While Calypso shuttled to and from Port Sudan with supplies and visitors, Rosaldo remained moored as the permanent surface support base. The main underwater station, named Starfish House because of its shape, had five rooms in four arms around a central hub, with an open moonpool on the bottom. The garage, anchored 50 feet away, was a steel hemisphere pressurized to keep out the water into which La Souscoupe could be guided by divers through a large hole in the bottom.
Falco led the Starfish House team, with Wesly, ship’s cook Pierre Guilbert, and marine biologists Raymond Vaissière and Pierre Vanoni. Their quarters were air-conditioned; the food and wine were equal to that in a good restaurant in Marseille; and they had music, television, telephones, sunlamps, games, and large windows through which they could watch fish, working divers, and the diving saucer when they were off duty. They could even smoke—which all of them did—because they breathed ordinary air pumped down from the surface. This time, Cousteau let Wesly bring his parrot, so they had a pet. They submitted to daily physicals and were constantly monitored by television cameras in every room, but Starfish House offered the precious gift of privacy, without which Falco and Wesly had fallen into moodiness and depression during Conshelf I.
